Mallarino Lab
Principal Investigator: Ricardo Mallarino
Institution: Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Changes occurring during embryogenesis are typically lethal or can lead to congenital malformations. In many cases, however, these changes can be beneficial because they can promote the origin of new traits and the evolution of adaptations. Because of this relationship between deleterious and viable variation, studying naturally occurring phenotypic diversity across the animal kingdom provides a powerful framework to study a fundamental question in developmental biology and biomedical sciences: How can development change without detrimental consequences? Our laboratory harnesses natural variation in mammalian skin to understand how changes during development can generate phenotypic variation. Through work funded by my Early-Stage Investigator R35, we have studied two distinct spatially patterned phenomena during skin development: (1) Stripe pattern formation in rodents, and (2) Gliding membrane formation in marsupials. As proven by our track record, this work has significantly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms by which skin is patterned. In the new funding period, we will focus on studying stripe pattern formation in rodents to uncover the mechanisms by w…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM133758-07: Using naturally evolved phenotypic variation to decipher the positional regulatory code of mammalian skin (2026)
- 1R01AR085664-01A1: The developmental basis of gliding membrane morphogenesis (2026)
- 2R35GM133758-06: Using naturally evolved phenotypic variation to decipher the positional regulatory code of mammalian skin (2025)
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